We have always been liberal at letting people promote their commercial Blender-related products and services here on Blender Artists. Today, we’re making a slight change to our policy to make sure these are always beneficial to the community.
Posting commercial messages is still allowed, but going forward you’ll have to make sure to ‘give back’, either by:
Being ‘a good community citizen’, by being an active forum user. Help other members, share your work in a non-commercial setting and participate in conversations. Keep a healthy balance between your commercial and community activities. You’re allowed to do one commercial post a month.
Developers can post the following as needed:
Release updates
Support answers
We’ll be monitoring for abuse though, so a ‘daily release’ trick is not going to be accepted, but a few times a month sounds reasonable.
Sometimes that may not be an option though, so you can also:
Financially support Blender Artists by becoming a Commercial Supporter on our Patreon. This will allow you to post one commercial message a month, which will be made ‘globally sticky’ for two days for extra attention.
We believe this new policy makes sense as it keeps the platform open and accessible for everyone, but encourages positive behavior as well as allows us to grow the platform and the team.
You should really define what constitutes a commercial message here.
For example, if someone sells an addon on the Blender Market and posts about it, but it’s also GPL-licensed and available on github, is that a commercial or noncommercial message?
What if it’s GPL (and so legally shareable with anyone), but only available through the market?
What about a texture site offering free textures, but which also has some paid textures on offer?
What about someone offering something for free, but also asking for optional support on patreon?
What about a user posting about a commercial offering by someone else entirely?
If a user posts about a new addon on the market or on gumroad, and then publishes a bugfix and says so in the thread, is that a separate commercial message counting against his monthly allotment?
I would assume it refers to anything being sold, regardless if BM, Gumroad, or something else.
How would this policy affect the type of stuff already being posted here (like addons in the scripts section)? Is this mostly to prevent someone from showing up and just posting product threads who does not really do much else on here?
The other question is does any of this refer to the technical use of the “commercial” tag or links to specific domains where people sell stuff? Or is this more of a general moderation policy to avoid sales spam? I don’t actually recall seeing too much spam of that nature?
Have you considered another funding option based on the former relationship with CG Cookie and Blender Market? Some kind of support option similar to their Blender Foundation one with the little heart icon?
I’d be much rather if addon and content developers competent enough to monetize their creation actually spent time working on their products to make them better instead of being forced mingle with community users, often pointlessly. Especially here on BA, where the level of discussion professionalism is below average compared to average CG related forums. This will just force them to fulfill their obligatory share of fake pleasantries to unlock a privilege to advertise their product. Wasting too much time interacting on the forums won’t help them make their products better
This is the first time ever I see a community based forum putting ability to advertise commercial product behind a paywall or at time-waste wall. Which is an irony given that the forum is dedicated to FOSS software.
Even getting behind the wall, 1 promotion per month is still quite lame. If someone is diligent and hard working enough to make two releases within a single month, then the person can’t let us know a new release is out. Well, they can, just not on BA.
The whole Blender plugin/addon ecosystem is already inhibited more than enough by the GPL licence, making it pretty much impossible to fight piracy of commercial addons. There’s no need hamper it even more by fighting commercial promotions on the largest Blender community site. Especially given the fact that you yourself do not exercise much restraint in terms of commercial advertising (think sketchfab banner taking up half of the screen). “To preach a water but drink a wine”
I know you need to make money to keep this site running, but leeching it from the addon developers isn’t a right way to go about it. Most of them don’t make that much, given Blender’s community overall attitude towards commercial stuff. We should encourage them, not throw sticks under their feet by limiting their already limited means of advertising their products.
Exactly. So if you sell something like FLIP fluids or HardOps, you are just relying on a good will of the buyers to not spread it further. And if they do, there’s nothing you can do about it.
However, I’d like to point out the situation is barely any different for commercial licenses. Court costs are much too prohibitive for small outfits to prosecute illegal users en masse, let alone in countries all over the globe.
Sure, I know it’s not piracy in a true sense of a word. I meant just that in Blender community, it may happen a bit more often since people assume if it’s legal, there’s nothing even morally wrong with it. My overall point is that developers of commercial content have already hard enough time as it stands right now. Limiting their ability to advertise their products on the largest Blender community system can impact them negatively even further. We really need to value them, and motivate them. This is going the exact opposite way.
Whatever your philosophical stance on commercializing GPL products is, it shouldn’t matter here, as intention of original post is to inform members that they are here for social reasons. We are part of collectively driven forum, rather than a market place. It’s sort of a virtual metropolis.
Why i see it as a nice move to prevent shamelessly selfish posts and exploitation of healthy community.
I think what needs to be defined is the rules regarding the promotion of addons that might see multiple releases a month.
If you make a post about a commercial addon, are you allowed to announce more than one news item a month in the thread created for it? The rule does not make any sense unless it regards independent threads announcing a product.
To me on the the hand, the new rules seem to be designed to “encourage” addon developers to financially contribute to the BA patreon. This is not evil in itself, but might become that way if abused. It would seem our CG Cookie overlords don’t believe they’re profiting enough from addon developers with just the Market. And maybe they aren’t - I don’t know.
They hold the keys to the forum and as a privately held and commercially minded enterprise, they’re free to censor whatever speech they choose, including “shameless” self promotion.
As I interoperate the new guidelines, being more active on the forums doesn’t have to mean pointless mingling. Among others, look at @masterxeon1001 , and @MACHIN3 as examples of people that are constantly engaging with the community to help troubleshoot problems with their plug-ins.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have more of that, as apposed to new members dumping links in the forums and never logging in again.
What if an addon author has his own forum, like Armory? Lubos provides plenty of support and communication over there. Should he be ostracized over here merely because as the main developer of a game engine he doesn’t have the time to engage with everyone?
